How to take your customer issue management to the next level

Wrong colour, missing part, damaged goods… Most of us have experienced this kind of trouble when receiving goods that we have ordered. As a company, receiving defective or incorrect products can have significant negative impact on your business: delay in manufacturing, unhappy customers, postponing of activities…

As a vendor shipping goods, you know how such issues can trigger customer dissatisfaction and you want to handle the issue in a timely and efficient manner before this snowballs into bigger problems.

In most companies, Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) use a manual process to deal with customer issues. An Excel spreadsheet or an issue tracking feature in their CRM that needs to be complemented by emails. And with time, as the number of customers grows, the list of issues increases. Those manual solutions quickly show their limitations: you struggle to find similar cases or to access the current status of a customer request and management does not have visibility on the issues in progress at the company level.

Good news: you are not alone and solutions exist: Customer Issue Management (CIM) solutions.

What is a Customer Issue Management solution?

A Customer Issue Management solution is a portal allowing you to

Log issues,

Propose resolutions,

Approve resolutions with smart workflow and

Close customer issues.

A good CIM solution is also more than that. It integrates with your ERP, allowing you to retrieve orders, claims and delivery notes into the CIM application.

You should be able to track issues easily with a simple dashboard. You also want to automatically notify each customer of the progress of its issues or claims. If the approval of solutions involve more than one person, you can easily add approvers to the workflow, still from the CIM application (no need to fire up Outlook for this!).

A powerful search engine allows you to retrieve past cases, whether you need history for a given company or for a given problem.

We also recommend that you choose a CIM solution with dashboards and reporting features. This way, you will know exactly how many issue cases are in progress at any time. You can also measure the performance of your customer service by comparing the number of solved issues from one month to another, for instance. Remember, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

What are the benefits of a CIM solution?

The first and probably most important benefit of using a CIM solution is that you will increase customer satisfaction and improve your relationship with your customers. Indeed, by centralising your issue resolution process, you will provide your customers with a resolution much faster than before.

Moreover, internal and external collaboration is enhanced. You will be able to set automatic notifications to be sent to your customer to give him/her visibility on the status of his/her case. Internally, you can also customise the solution approval workflow.

In addition to this, the history of all issues available in the application will be a true knowledge database for you and your team. If someone had the same issue before and found an appropriate solution, there is no need for you to spend time on “reinventing the wheel”!

This knowledge database will also be precious when your company decides on future feature developments and product quality improvement.
And again, dashboards and reports will allow you to measure the performance of your team, hence driving greater efficiency in your team as well as reducing the stress level associated with customer issues and claims.